Few minutes ago, Facebook the social media giant made a surprise announcement in a blog post that they have agreed to buy leading instant messaging platform WhatsApp for a whopping $16 billion.
To better explain the deal Facebook highlighted some of WhatsApp’s key metrics: It’s estimated that over 450 million people are using WhatsApp worldwide today of which 70% are active, adding another million users per day and quickly approaching the entire volume of carrier-based SMS worldwide.
“WhatsApp is on a path to connect 1 billion people. The services that reach that milestone are all incredibly valuable,” said Mark Zuckerberg, Facebook founder and CEO. “I’ve known Jan for a long time and I’m excited to partner with him and his team to make the world more open and connected.”
Now, the deal is expected to close later this year with a juicy $2 billion payout for WhatsApp’s founders ($1 billion in cash, $1 billion in Class A common stock) should things fall through due to failure of obtaining the required regulatory approvals or otherwise.
wow this is a gud development i think mr. mark is on top of his goal to make the world open and connected.
Oscar,
I saw the status update from Mark earlier this morning. I must observe that though Mark is relatively young, he is a hell lot of a smart guy – whatsapp has got real potential!
The only problem I have is with Jan…if he had stood his ground, he would have been a formidable competitor of Facebook in the years to come. Twitter famously refused to sell and the results are there for all to see!
Always,
Terungwa
Am wondering what Facebook really want to use whatsapp for?
Yea terungwa you are absolutely right.
Jan needs the huge amount of money to come to hi om at once instead of making more name lick Mack. I guess he will regret it later.
eeemmm…but wait. Who knows his intention. Should it be that he has developed another one that will superimpose facebook, whatsapp and twitter? Let’s still keep our fingers crossed
You might be right Jasper. Thanks for showing up down here. 🙂